Politics

By the time I transmigrated into this world, the story was already nearing its end.

The realm had been united, and the New Emperor had ascended the throne.

The woman who had shared his hardships and stayed by his side through everything had been granted a cup of poisoned wine.

And I was the Empress he was about to marry: the legitimate daughter of the Wang Clan, born of an illustrious house.

I looked at the woman who had just drunk the poisoned wine. “Do you know why I came?”

She let out a cold laugh, sweat beading across her brow. “Afraid I won’t die?”

“No.” I took a pill from my sleeve and pushed it into her mouth. “Afraid you will.”

After eight years in a nunnery, I received a cup of poisoned wine from my twin sister.

Her face was full of contempt.

“You live in a nunnery, yet you bed His Majesty every night.

Have you no shame?”

“Tomorrow, His Majesty means to bring you back to the palace.

Someone as lowly as you has no business being a Noble Consort.

Let your elder sister take that place.”

Smiling, I drank the poison and watched her step over my corpse to board the phoenix palanquin bound for the palace.

What she did not know was that being summoned to his bed at any hour, in any place, was worse than death.

On the night of the empress’s funeral, His Majesty and I spent the entire night together in a side hall.

Everyone in the capital called me shameless.

After all, the empress was my own aunt, and His Majesty was her husband—my uncle by marriage.

Before that, I had been meant to marry the crown prince.

But Yuan Xiujin did not like me.

He despised my coarse origins, sneered at the Meng family’s rustic ways, and thought us unworthy of the Eastern Palace.

As if I thought any better of him.

Father and son, yet so different.

Yuan Xiujin let a woman lead him by the nose.

Yuan Zhaoyu already held the empire in his hand.

Since he would not let me become his crown princess, I would simply have to become his father’s consort instead.

After marrying the notoriously tyrannical emperor, I accidentally swapped bodies with him.

But the exchange wasn’t quite permanent.

By day, he dismissed officials.

By night, I rescued them.

He punished the consorts.

I soothed the beauties.

And he still had the nerve to snap at me.

“Which hand did you touch her with?”

Honestly.

Without me, this country would fall apart sooner or later.

I had been the most pampered princess since childhood, yet everyone called me brutal, cold, inhuman.

Even my younger brother, now emperor, had slowly begun to distance himself from me.

He said he had found his real elder sister.

I smiled at Princess Ronghua.

She did bear a certain resemblance to my imperial brother.

Indeed.

A pair of bastards passing themselves off as imperial blood.

I was the daughter of a male courtesan and a prostitute, born of their illicit affair.

For someone of my birth, life was supposed to mean servitude or prostitution.

My parents often urged me, “While you’re still young and beautiful, coax some wealthy, powerful patron into buying your freedom.

You can become his concubine.

That would be better than selling your looks in a brothel.”

But I was young and proud then.

I refused to become a powerful man’s plaything, to spend my whole life at someone else’s mercy.

So before the madam could make me take clients, I escaped from Rouge House.

Everyone calls Xie Qingwei the finest nobleman in Shengdu, and Jiang Zhiyu has perfected every virtue expected of a woman to win his family’s approval.

Then a vision shows her the miserable future awaiting her as his wife.

Determined to escape, she points to the impoverished Xue Shao and declares him the man she loves.

But securing a better marriage is only the beginning: in a world that gives women so few choices, Zhiyu may have to find a higher place of her own.

For four years, Emperor Pei Guannan has refused to fill his harem, and the court blames the man at his side.

Xie Yuanzhen has shared his hardships for fifteen years, asking for neither power nor reward.

But loyalty cannot give the dynasty an heir, and love cannot silence the ministers.

To protect the emperor’s name, Yuanzhen leaves the palace to serve the people.

Across snowbound roads and the endless rain of Nanyue, the words they cannot say become letters—and a promise to live to eighty.

Mother often taught me, “A principal wife must have the grace to accept others.”

I was born into a prestigious family as its eldest legitimate daughter. From the day I entered this world, it was destined that even if my future husband was not a prince, nobleman, general, or minister, he would at least be the eldest legitimate son of a family equal to mine in status.

A man destined to inherit his family’s legacy and become the head of his clan was, in all likelihood, never going to be monogamous.

And so, from my earliest childhood until the day I married, I heard the same lesson over and over again: “A principal wife must have the grace to accept others.”

The year I turned fifteen, I buried my foster mother and entered the imperial palace.

I became a princess.

They said the late empress had cut me from her womb before setting herself on fire.

That I looked exactly like her.

How could I not?

Fifteen years of going hungry at every meal and swallowing medicine every day had seen to that.

At least all that effort had paid off.

I had finally wormed my way into the palace!